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Reprinted from the New England Magazine, October, 1891. 




THE WOMAN'S MOVEMENT IN THE SOUTH. 

By A. D. Mayo. 



^)]^>>T is not easy to-day to com- 
prehend the full signifi- 
cance of the revolution 
in American society in- 
augurated by the late 
Civil War. A few of the 
most obvious effects of 
the great war are known 
to all. The complete de- 
struction of the most 
powerful aristocratic class in Christen- 
dom, as far as concerned its direct 
influence upon national affairs ; the 
abolition of the semi-feudal institution 
of American slavery, and the elevation 
of five millions of people, to all the 
rights of American citizenship ; the 
overthrow of the leading industrial 
system that had prevailed nearly three 
centuries, in a country as large as 
Europe outside the Russian Empire ; 
the bitter struggle, perhaps not yet 
over, that has accompanied the re- 
adjustment of civil, social and financial 
relations between the two races that peo- 
ple sixteen great states, — these and 
other results of that tremendous conflict 
are already apparent to all. But other 
and less obvious consequences are begin- 
ning to appear, in the slowly developing 
life of the new republic. These changes, 
revealed or hidden, in the midst of which 
we live to-day, may be summed up as the 
radical transformation of an Anglo-Saxon, 
semi-aristocratic into an American, dem- 
ocratic order of human affairs. Until 
the breaking out of the war, American 
society, in the old East and through the 
entire South, was a gradual broadening 
of the aristocratic order of British civil- 
ization from which it sprung. No less in 
Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, 
than in Richmond, Charleston, and New 
Orleans, were the claims of superior race, 
family, inherited wealth, culture and so- 
cial station acquiesced in, with only a 
prospect of gradual change. Thirty 
years ago Emerson said : " Old 
England extends to the Alleghanies ; 
America begins in Ohio." The emanci- 



pation of the southern negro and his 
recognition as a full American citizen 
completed the process, begun by the 
naturalization of the immigrant European 
peasant in. the North, and cast "into the 
trembling balance of national affairs a 
make-weight which has finally committed 
the Union to the cause of popular gov- 
ernment and republican society. 

There are still powerful organizations 
and influences on the ground that fiercely 
challenge that result, and threaten new 
conflicts of these tendencies on new 
issues. What is implied by the term 
"Bourbonism" in the South; the con- 
centrated influence of a zealous and able 
priesthood in more than one division of 
the American church ; the attempt, in 
certain quarters, to rally the cultivated 
class, by a sort of literary Free-masonry, 
to distrust in American ideas ; the affec- 
tation of narrow cliques, in all social cen- 
tres, to bring in the European ideal of a 
superior social caste ; the prodigious and 
rapid centralization of vast industrial 
interests in the grasp of gigantic corpor- ' 
ations, — here is certainly a counter 
current, not to be overlooked and ik 
without great influence, either for w] 
some restraint or mischievous ob-. 
tion. But, however protracted ma-) 
the struggle, and however numerous 
changes of scenery in the shifting drai 
of the future, no thoughtful man ca 
long doubt on which side the victory wiL 
rest. For evil or good, the democratic 
idea is bound to prevail in American 
affairs. That idea is not communistic, 
anarchical or subversive of inevitab^ 
gradations in society. It is the progrf 
sive reconstruction of human affa 
around the idea that every human be; 
shall have fair opportunity to deve 
what has been given him by his Ma" 
with the corresponding obligation t 
every human being is bound to use 
superiorities and successes for the up 
ing of all. Said Lord Napier to a c 
tinguished American clergyman, fc 
years ago, " Great Britain is on the sar 



Cm(L''-v 2. 



250 



\ I'HE WOMAN'S MOVEMENT IN THE SOUTH. 



rsLvs 



inclined plane as the United States. You 
are only a little farther down the grade 
than we." The complete outcome of 
the American experiment in our New 
World will be the emancipation of man- 
kind through every nook and corner of 
the inhabited earth. We can baffle, em- 
barrass, and complicate the movement 
through its entire progress. We can 
plunge this continent into new and bloody 
wars. We may so hinder the preparation 
of the "common people" for their fu- 
ture dominion, that the rule of the many 
shall become the dominion of a mob, 
only mitigated by the stolid resistance 
of the select minority. But if we bear 
ourselves in wisdom and patience, the 
coming in of the people's day will not be 
the sunset of liberty, but the sunrise of a 
nobler social order than has yet been 
known to mankind. One of the logical 
results of this condition of aifairs is the 
theme of the present essay. 

When I speak of "The Woman's 
Movement in the Southern States " I 
encounter the risk of a varied misap- 
prehension. The enthusiastic advocate 
of "Woman's Rights" may fancy lam 
about to announce a grand rally to the 
standard of woman suffrage, and all things 
inscribed on that banner, among the 
southern sisters. A "stalwart" politi- 
'■^n may suspect that I am about to 
il the existence of a far-reaching 
piracy among the mothers of sixteen 
js to train their offspring for another 
i against the Union. The summer 
^rrespondent, whose knowledge of south- 
ern womanhood is confined to the obser- 
vation of the crowd of handsome lady 
loungers on the piazzas of southern 
watering places, may query whether there 
is any "movement" at all in these slum- 
brous realms of "good society." Yet 
hers ' may think I am to tell the won- 
ous story of a resurrection into superior 
manhood among the freedmen and 
oor white trash." It is concerning 
le of these specially, though of some- 
ng including them all incidentally, that 
rite. 

'- am not speaking on this delicate 
:me " as one having authority," although 
nave seen many things. A northern 
an, Puritan by descent, aristocratic in 



the grain, with liberal democratic and 
cosmopolitan theorie^s in religion and 
public affairs, educated by thirty years in 
Massachusetts, New York, and Ohio, I 
never had an intimate acquaintance with 
one woman of southern birth until a dozen 
years ago, and had scarcely travelled in 
the South until " called " on the ministry 
of education in which I have been en- 
gaged for the last twelve years. But my 
opportunities during these years for look- 
ing into southern society as it is being 
shaped by the generation of young peo- 
ple born since the opening of the Civil 
War have been, perhaps, unusual, certainly 
very widely extended. That overlook 
includes a perpetual journeying through 
all these states during the entire school 
year, with constant public addresses, in- 
spection of southern schools of all grades, 
entertainment in the homes of every 
class, frequent preaching in the churches 
of all denominations, with the friendly 
personal confidences of great numbers of 
representative men and women. And, 
without changing a single feature of iny 
theory of American society and with no 
consciousness of having been swerved 
from the right line of fidelity to funda- 
mental American principles by the friend- 
liness of these people, I have come to a 
few conclusions possibly novel to some 
of my readers, but welcome surely to 
every one who rejoices in the name of 
American woman. 

Perhaps there was never a more com- 
plete ignorance of the actual condition 
of society between two sections of the 
same country than between our northern 
and southern states for a generation pre- 
vious to the late war. Whatever of in- 
timate commingling had existed in the 
earlier days of the republic had almost 
passed away in the growing estrangement 
that came of the continued exasperation 
of the slavery controversy. The northern 
people who travelled South were chiefly 
of the sort who sympathized with south- 
ern institutions, and saw only the sunny 
side of that land. Our white southern 
visitors were entirely of the ruling class, 
on errands of business, pleasure, or poli- 
tics, commonly the guests or associates 
of their special northern friends. Mutual 
distrust and misapprehension ruled the 



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THE WOMAN'S MOVEMENT IN THE SOUTH. 



251 



hour. Slavery was a picturesque drop- 
curtain, which shut away the real condi- 
tion of the southern people from the 
North as coiTipletely as its prototype 
before the stage. 

Among these figures, the southern 
woman of the ruling class (for the North 
saw no other) was prominent. The 
ordinary idea of this type of American 
womanhood, even among the masses of 
intelhgent people of the North, was a 
woman of tropical nature, with fascinating 
person and manners, a despot in society, 
often eccentric and imperious after the 
style of the "leading lady" on the stage, 
averse to labor, contemptuous of self- 
support, listless and tempestuous by turns, 
a tyrant among her slaves, and a fury in 
sectional politics, the most influential 
factor in the impending war. And still, 
although the past twenty-five years has 
virtually thrown open the southern states, 
and the entire region from Washington 
to Texas swarms with winter tourists, the 
old notion dies hard. I am asked a 
dozen times a week, by excellent people, 
in all parts of the North, if I do not find 
the southern women filled with bitterness 
over the results of the war, and if the 
southern girl of the period is not that 
contradictory nondescript, at once a list- 
less, shiftless, superficial butterfly of so- 
ciety, and an artful conspirator against 
the peace of the nation. True, I have 
noticed that whenever two young women 
of similar capacity, culture, and social 
status are brought together, from Massa- 
chusetts and South Carohna, a new 
mutual admiration society is imminent. 
The most enthusiastic crowd that an 
elderly gentleman can pilot through the 
glories of Back Bay, Bunker Hill, Faneuil 
Hall, Concord, and the Harvard campus 
is the flock of bright southern girls which 
every season brings on its flight to our 
northern summer schools. Still, the aver- 
age New England or western community 
obstinately holds on to the picture of the 
southern woman painted on the drop- 
curtain, and half suspects a northern man 
of being the victim of a sentimental craze, 
who ventures to tell the story of the new 
A^oman's movement at the South as it 
looks to unprejudiced though friendly 
eyes. I do not pretend to know all 



about these matters of which I write, — 
and many a southern woman might 
honestly believe me wrong in my diag- 
nosis of southern social affairs ; but I do 
know more than the majority of my 
northern friends. 

It should be said, in the first place, 
that the popular northern idea of the 
southern woman of the leading class, 
before the war, was largely evolved from 
the realm of romance. That the superior 
woman of the South was characterized in 
those days by the early development of 
personal charms, a winning social grace 
and friendliness, and an ambition for social 
superiority in that concentrated her educa- 
tion on social culture, was doubtless true. 
But the notion that the leading class in 
the South was distinguished by superior 
descent or eminent culture from a similar 
class in the old northern states was un- 
true. The best "old families" of both 
sections came from similar original Brit- 
ish stock, — the great intelligent, pro- 
gressive middle class that has created the 
new republic and reconstructed the Great 
Britain of two centuries ago. 

The opportunities afforded by foreign 
travel and education of the ordinary 
American type for girls half a century 
a^o, for the growth of fine womanly 
qualities among these classes, was very 
evenly distributed through the states east 
of the Alleghanies. While the southern 
schools for girls were sufficiently numer- 
ous and well-appointed to meet the 
ordinary demand for the education of 
the young woman of the better class — 
the only woman who was schooled at all 
— and many of the more favored girls 
were sent North or to Europe for better 
training ; yet, on the whole, the " female 
seminaries " of the old North, imperfect 
as they may have been, were the better 
of the two, and the average of book- 
learning and the scholarly habit more 
marked among the young women north 
than south of Washington. 

Yet the southern woman of thirty 
years ago was just what the woman of 
New England, Pennsylvania, or New 
York would have been, had her grand- 
father removed to Georgia or Texas, and 
had she been reared amid the influences of 
the southern country life of that remote 



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252 



THE WOMAN'S MOVEMENT IN THE SOUTH. 



era. The North saw our southern sister 
at the most and least attractive angles of 
her life, — as the brilliant idol of society, 
and as the listless victim of an indolence 
largely the result of enervating climate, 
unwholesome habits of living, and the 
demoralizing environment of a servile 
class. But the southern woman the 
North did not see was of the same essen- 
tial type it loves and honors at home. 
On a thousand lonely plantations, often 
in unwholesome and discouraging sur- 
roundings, born into a state of society 
from which no woman could escape, the 
majority of the planters' wives and 
daughters bore themselves, in those old 
days, with the same womanly devotion, 
intelligence, quiet energy, and daily self- 
sacrifice that everywhere characterized 
the superior American woman of the past 
generations. 

Indeed, while all the advantages' of 
slavery were monopolized by the negro 
savage, who was changed by two centuries 
of servitude into the " American citizen 
of African descent" we beheld in 1865, 
and while the aristocratic man of the 
South did seem to reap undeniable re- 
sults in the enjoyment of personal, social, 
and political power, the heavy end of 
that lot was always lifted by the woman. 
The Christian wife and mother could not 
but look with silent dismay down into the 
black, bottomless gulf of temptation that 
yawned below the cradle of every boy. 
Her husband's slaves were a mob of half- 
civilized children, always under her feet, 
and her life at home, with many redeem- 
ing attractions, was a daily service of toil, 
anxiety and often, half-hopeless effort to 
hold things together and do her full duty 
as mistress of the mansion. The prevail- 
ing idea of womanhood forbade her to 
step out upon a multitude of paths open 
to her sister of the North. To teach, to 
engage in any industrial calling of self- 
support, except on the compulsion of dire 
necessity or from the impulse of genius, 
was not for her. No rage for religious 
speculation tumbled the placid waters of 
her country church, and the Protestant 
clergy had practically as thorough control 
of her education as the Catholic priest- 
hood assumes for the young women of 
their flocks to-day. 



That such a life, with its peculiar 
romance and excitement, was a powerful 
stimulus to deep thought and brooding 
sentiment, giving to the character of the 
southern woman that undertone of pathos 
and intensity that still hangs about her like 
the sad and almost tragic refrain of her 
whole life, we • can easily understand. 
That it developed a type of woman most 
powerful in her hold upon the men of her 
own section, and, as she comes to be 
better known, destined to be more largely 
influential than ever before in the na- 
tional life, we cannot doubt. The finest 
fruits of aristocratic society are always 
garnered by the best women. The 
South, before the war, was rich in ex- 
cellent women who, like their sex every- 
where, committed body and soul to their 
own order of social affairs, were the 
most precious of the manifold treasures of 
that mysterious land. 

Said a northern soldier's wife : 

" I lived a while, during the war, in a camp of 
Confederate prisoners, as the wife of the com- 
mander of the post, whose duty it was to open the 
letters that came to these men from their families 
aiid friends. As I looked at the photographs of 
women that came in these letters, I couldn't 
wonder that these men were ready to light to the 
death under the powerful spell of those eloquent 
faces and flashing eyes." 

We are hearing great things nowadays, 
and I have seen in my numerous visita- 
tions, something of the vast mineral 
treasures of the South, almost undis- 
covered before the year i860, now prom- 
ising to surpass the richest deposits in 
any land. But the one mine from which 
the South will gather pearls beyond price, 
in the upward lift to its enlarging destiny, 
through the years to come, is the marvel- 
lous treasure-house of its young woman- 
hood, — in the days of the mothers hid- 
den from the nation by the drop curtain 
of slave society, now opening, in the 
deeper realms of life, moving to its right- 
ful influence and its own peculiar place in 
the American sisterhood to whom we 
look for the redemption of the land. 

The great broom of war swept the 
eleven seceding states of the South almost 
clean of effective white manhood through 
four awful years. For the first time in 
the history of these states, the white 



THE WOMAN'S MOVEMENT IN THE SOUTH. 



253 



women of every class were left in virtual 
possession of the home life. The South, 
in i860, was a vast, sparsely populated 
country, with but one great city south of 
Washington, the superior people dispersed 
through the quiet plantation life of the 
old regime. There, far from the alarm 
of invasion, the vast majority of these 
women, through four terrible years, car- 
ried in their arms the entire home life of 
these states ; not only bearing the burdens 
so nobly assumed by their northern sisters, 
the management of children and the 
work for the soldier in camp, field, and 
hospital, but, in large measure, occupied 
by the management of more than four 
million slaves, in a state of wild sup- 
pressed expectancy such as only they 
could comprehend. How wonderfully 
well they went through that awful period ; 
how, day by day, their faculty of ad- 
ministration grew apace ; how they 
thought and pondered and wept and 
prayed and suffered on, thousands of the 
best of them in the grip of relentless 
poverty, — all this was veiled from us. 
What we did hear was the very obvious 
fact that the woman. South, even, beyond 
her sister in the North, was a flame of 
fire in the cause she had been educated 
from her cradle to believe was the cause 
of God, and that its overthrow would in- 
volve the destruction of all good things 
given to her in this world. 

And the strange thing, even yet not 
fully comprehended by many of our sis- 
ters of the South, is that no schooling 
less stringent than the frightful ordeal of 
a destructive civil war, which virtually 
exhausted the life of an entire generation 
of women, could have brought the woman 
of the South up to the threshold of the 
magnificent opportunity on which her 
foot is planted to-day. Neither we nor 
she could have seen how, beyond the 
smoke and dust of war, the glory of the 
Lord was on its way for her deliverance, 
and that the downfall of the cause for 
which she so bravely gave her life was to 
be the signal for an uplift of which she 
had never dreamed. 

For the one thing needed by the 
southern white woman, of every class, a 
generation ago, was emancipation from 
the spell cast over her executive energies 



by the very constitution of society into 
which she was born. With an excess of 
chivalric devotion to women, that to our 
cooler northern temperament appears 
almost romantic, the southern man, in 
the old tyne, never fully understood that 
the most genuine worship of woman is 
shown by the large appreciation of her 
nature and her place in the modern 
world and the ready offer of the helping 
hand in every honest and womanly effort 
to do her best for her country and man- 
kind. Chivalry, always the same in es- 
sentials, flowers out in varied expression 
from age to age. The knight of five 
centuries ago, in Europe, was a stalwart 
brother, clad in cumbrous brass or 
sheathed in shining steel, ready to break 
his own heart or crack his rival's head in 
behalf of a blooming damsel who could 
probably neither read nor write, but 
whom he adored as " queen of love and 
beauty." The American knight of to- 
day is a fine young fellow in citizen's 
dress, who gives his hand, with his heart 
and his pocket-book in it, to his little 
sister, his pretty cousin, or his youngish 
maiden aunt, saying, " Go, dear, to the 
university and study to your heart's con- 
tent, — and when you come home with 
your diploma in your reticule, we'll crown 
you queen of love and beauty and prin- 
cess of light." It is beginning to be 
understood among the noblest women of 
the South that in no way save by the 
complete wreck of the old order could 
the young v/oman of to-day be found, 
like the wise virgin, with lamp trimmed 
and burning, awaiting the bridegroom, — 
the woman's "calling and election" in 
the "grand and awful time " which our 
eyes behold. 

The slaveholders of the South, in 
i860, did not number the present popu- 
lation of Boston, and the entire body of 
people personally interested ni the insti- 
, tution could hardly have amounted to 
three of the eight miUions of the white 
people of the South. That class, in 
i860, was the most powerful aristocracy 
in Christendom. It ruled the American 
republic, plunged the nation into a civil 
war, and almost swung the two foremost 
powers of Europe over to itself. In 
1865, that body of people was more com- 



\v 



( 



254 



THE WOMAN'S MOVEMENT IN THE SOUTH. 



pletely overwhelmed than any similar 
class in modern times. Not only was its 
political domination in national affairs 
forever gone, but it was reduced to almost 
absolute poverty, without the severe in- 
dustrial executive training that makes 
poverty the lightest of all burdens for the 
young man and woman of the North. 
Not one in ten of these old respectable 
families has emerged from this financial 
wreck, or will ever stand again on its feet 
in the old way. Of course, the woman 
bore the cross in this complete prostra- 
tion of loftiest hopes. In 1865, many 
thousands of the women of the leading 
class of the South were left with a less 
hopeful outlook for the life of comfort 
and household ease so dear to every 
woman than multitudes of the servant 
girls that swarm the pavements of our 
northern towns on the evening of a 
summer day. 

But to another class of southern wo- 
men this experience came in another 
way. Far more numerous than the 
throng of suffering women of the better 
sort was the great crowd of the wives 
and daughters of the non-slave-holding 
white man. Under this class, minus the 
fringe of "poor white trash," the tramps 
of the South in all but their lazy deter- 
mination not to tramp, must be included 
a variety of people, from the reckless 
woodsman in the pine forests of the 
Atlantic and Gulf Coast, through the 
vigorous farmers of the Piedmont realm, 
over among the two million dwellers in 
the interminable mountain region, as 
large as Central Europe, that extends 
from Harper's Ferry almost to within 
sight of the lovely capital of Alabama. 

Of the white women of these various 
classes we at the North knew nothing — 
and know very little to-day. That many 
of them were ignorant, often vulgar and 
weak in their womanhood, living in 
strange discomfort, we have been told, 
with variations, by the omniscient metro- 
politan reporter, by the omnipresent 
drummer and, later, by the novelists of 
the South, who have penetrated to their 
homes. But the other side of the story 
has not been told. These people are 
almost wholly of the original British 
stock that peopled the New England and 



.the Middle States, radically kind and con- 
fiding, their vices and follies rather the 
faults of neglected children than of the 
depraved class that is the terror of our 
great American towns. Hence we need 
not be surprised to learn that to this 
class the war brought a great era of 
emancipation and found in it a people 
ready to step out into the light before 
the country. 

The first result of peace was to bring 
multitudes of the men of this class for- 
ward as buyers and owners of better 
lands than they could obtain under the 
old order of affairs. All over the South, 
especially on the beautiful slopes and in the 
vast mountain regions, we see the rising 
homes of these new folk. We meet their 
boys in all the growing villages. They 
swarm in Texas. The city of Atlanta, 
has almost been created by them, with 
Senator Joe Brown as their " best man." 
In the schools for girls, these shy, awk- 
ward, shut-up maidens are carrying off 
the prizes and going forth as teachers. 
They are the " factory girls " in the new 
cotton mills, and are ready to work, as 
they are taught, in the various ways by 
which thousands of American women are 
earning honest money. If I were twenty 
years younger, I would go in, as a mis- 
sionary of the education of the head, the 
heart, and the hand, at Harper's Ferry, 
and only come out for supplies, till not 
only was my hair gray, but my head bald, 
and I ready to embark on the long 
journey to the Beyond. One of the 
noblest of the good women teachers of 
North Carolina; who established a school 
for girls in the chief town in that won- 
derful upland world of the old North 
State, writes : 

" The prospects for my boarding-school for the 
more favored young ladies of the vicinity are 
excellent. But oh, for money, money, money, to 
educate the poor, dear ignorant girls of this glo- 
rious mountain land ! " 

What can be done with the children, 
even of the lowest class of this sort, the 
" trash " of the coast country, may be 
known by sitting on the platform of Amy 
Bradley's Tileston school, in Wilmington, 
North Carolina, and looking into the 
faces of four hundred of them, — as fair 
to look upon as our own little New En^- 



THE WOMAN'S MOVEMENT IN THE SOUTH. 



^hb 



land boys and girls. Our North is rich 
in the honors of philanthropy; but no 
work done for the uplift of the children 
will shine with a brighter record than the 
twenty-five years' service of Amy Brad- 
ley, a Boston schoolmistress, in the 
draining of the Wilmington " Dry Pond," 
through the steady financial backing of 
Mrs. Mary Hemenway, who, not content 
with her gift of $125,000 for the educa- 
tion of the poor of that locality, and her 
munificence to the colored folk at Hamp- 
ton Institute, has now built on even 
broader foundations, in her school of ele- 
mentary learning and industrial arts in a 
suburb of Norfolk. 

i\nd what of the negro women — the 
three millions of them between the Poto- 
mac and the Rio Grande? What has 
emancipation and a generation of freedom 
done for them? For the vicious, weak, 
and foolish, what liberty always does at 
first for an enslaved race — barring the 
ferocity that always flares out from a 
similar emancipated class in the lower 
regions of European life. Let us not for- 
get that our Freedman is the latest comer 
who knocks at the door of the world's 
new civilization. The colored ancestry 
of the most civilized of these people dates 
back less than three hundred years ; 
while probably a third of them would 
find their grandfathers of a century ago 
in the jungles of the Dark Continent. 
Among these women are as many grades 
of native intellectual, moral, and execu- 
tive force, to say nothing of acquirements, 
as among the white people. The planta- 
tions of the Gulf, the Atlantic Coast, and 
the Mississippi bottoms swarm with negro 
women who seem hardly lifted above the 
brutes. And I know a group of young 
colored women, many of them accom- 
plished teachers, in Washington, D. C, 
who bear themselves as gently and with 
as varied womanly charms as any score 
of ladies in the land. 

The one abyss of perdition to this class 
is the slough of unchastity in which, as a 
race, they still flounder, half-conscious 
that it is a slough, — the double inheri- 
tance of savage Africa and that one hate- 
ful thing in slavery for which even good 
old Nehemiah Adams could find no ex- 
cuse. But here things are mending, — 



a good deal faster than the average south- 
ern man will allow, though all too slow to 
justify the fond enthusiasm of those else- 
where who only know the negro as the 
romantic figure in the great war, and the 
petted child of the Christian church in 
the North and foreign lands. I have 
looked' upon many thousands of these 
girls, in the schools established by the 
splendid philanthropy of the North and 
in the local public schools of the southern 
country ; and I am sure that in the midst 
of this wild, weltering sea of unstable 
womanhood is slowly forming a continent 
of pure, honest, Christian young women, 
who have before them a nobler' mission 
field than the women of any civilized 
land, in the redemption arid training to 
personal morality of their sisters of the 
South. 

For here is the fulcrum over which 
any lever that would lift the younger 
colored people must pry. No read- 
juster politician, preaching a gospel of 
repudiation ; no clamor for the right to eat 
and sleep and ride and study in the 
same place as the white man; no craze 
for the higher education, or any device 
of mental or industrial culture that leaves 
out of account the foundations of a solid 
and righteous life ; no ecstasy of senti- 
mental or passional religion that floats 
away soul and sense in a deluge of muddy 
emotion ; nothing but the severe training 
of more than one generation of these 
colored girls in the central virtue of 
womanhood can assure the success of 
this entire region of American citizen- 
ship. Until the colored woman has her 
feet securely planted on that rock, all 
that any or everybody can do for her 
race is like treasure flung into an abyss. 
As she gains on that path, all good things 
will come to her and hers. The radical 
disability of the negro to-day is the fatal 
disability of a feeble morality. In all 
else, though not an imitation white man, 
notably no revised edition of the Anglo- 
Saxon white man, he has a wealth of 
nature and a speciality of gifts that will 
bring him out one of the most useful 
and, by all odds, the most picturesque of 
the characters in our manifold American 
life. 

And now, how are these women of the 



/ 



256 



THE WOMAN'S MOVEMENT IN THE SOUTH. 



South, the various grades and classes of 
them, bearing themselves at the opening 
of the great day of woman's destiny 
through these states of the Southland? 
For we need not fancy that the southern 
woman, of any class, is going back to the 
place where we saw her a generation ago. 
The old places have passed away. She 
cannot be the same Lady Bountiful on 
the plantation ; she cannot queen it, as 
of old, in Washington, or be the same 
kind of southern portent abroad, the same 
" low-down ' ' white woman of the moun- 
tains, the same slave mother, even the 
same reckless companion of the white 
man's folly, as in the _ days gone by. 
There are plenty of women in all these 
states who do not know this ; who will 
still pine for what is forever gone, or 
wreck themselves in frantic struggles 
after what can never be to them what it 
was to their mothers, even if obtained. 
But in any thoughtful estimate of woman- 
kind we must leave out the conventional 
sisterhood, foolish or respectable, that 
never looks beyond the hour and drifts, 
like one of the great flowery grass-islands 
of the shallow bayou. When we write of 
the southern woman's movement, we 
mean the movement of all women in the 
South who " having eyes, see, and having 
ears, hear," and having souls welcome the 
call of God and go forth, ofttimes under 
a cloud of local prejudice, but more and 
more coming to be known as the leaders 
of the higher society in every state. 
How are these young women meeting the 
call ? What is of far more importance to 
some of us, what can the women of the 
North do to help them in these toilsome 
early years ? 

The South of to-day is still an all-out- 
doors country, as large as Europe out- 
side of Russia, its eastern slope and 
southwestern empire in some ways con- 
trasting like our own East and West ; 
yet its oldest states, like Virginia and the 
Carolinas, in many important respects a 
border-land, to be waked up and thor- 
oughly populated, in the same manner as 
our new Northwest. In all these states, 
leaving out half-a-dozen border cities, 
there is but one town of metropolitan 
dimensions and character, — New Or- 
leans ; a dozen others, some of historic 



importance, others of recent growth, of 
fifty thousand and upwards, and a larger 
number of between five thousand and 
twenty thousand ; in all, not so many 
people gathered in proper city life, in the 
thirteen states below the border, as in 
New England. The vast majority of the 
superior families of the South still abide 
in a quiet country or village life which, 
in all save cheapness of living, is below 
that of the corresponding region in any 
northern state in the opportunities for 
personal culture and diversified industry, 
so valued by our American young women 
of ability and spirit. 

Through these vast areas, in all these 
states, common schools have been estab- 
lished, chiefly since 1870, better than 
ever were thought of before, but in most 
places outside the larger towns, lament- 
ably ineffectual to meet the needs of the 
people. School districts five miles square, 
— such muddy miles in winter, such 
blazing miles in summer ; log or indif- 
ferent frame schoolhouses, with all sorts 
of substitutes ; teachers, paid twenty dol- 
lars, thirty dollars, possibly forty dollars a 
month, and " find themselves " for a term 
of three to four months in the year in the 
Gulf region, from four to five elsewhere ; 
the absolute separation of the races in all 
schools controlled by the southern peo- 
ple ; — these drawbacks to education in 
the country bear heavily on the white 
girl. 

The agricultural life of all these states 
is improving ; but a plantation in central 
Georgia or a stock-farm in southeastern 
Texas is about the slowest coach in which 
an ambitious American woman can be 
" booked " for her life journey. The 
bright young men are flying^ from this 
life in crowds. They cannot be expected 
to stand by the " old folks at home " and 
fight out the battle of their changing 
system of labor, when every growing 
county town, little city, and, especially, 
the rising empire beyond the Mississippi 
are beckoning them to the rewards of 
active enterprise. One of the chief 
hindrances to the rapid change of south- 
ern country life is this drifting away of 
the young men, who would naturally 
become the leaders in all progressive 
things, leaving on the ground so many of 



THE WOMAN'S MOVEMENT IN THE SOUTH 



2bl 



the unenterprising, vicious, idle youth, 
who have only vigor enough to stand up 
to the home crib and eat their fill. So, 
more and more, with notable exceptions 
in every state, the country, which was the 
stronghold of the old southern society, is 
left to the negroes, the poorer white men 
who "come in and buy or rent the farms, 
and the women of the old famihes, who 
must stay where there is a house to cover 
and a granary to feed the home flock. 
Into such a life as this, bereaved of so 
many influences, outside the home en- 
joyed by the young women A other por- 
tions of the country, myriads of southern 
girls are born ; and there they must stay, 
unless they develop an energy of which 
the most enterprising girl is not always 
capable, to push out, get a fair education 
from a neighboring academy, contriving 
meanwhile to get money enough to meet 
reasonable demands for dress, and the 
little outings that vary the monotony of 
the home. There are few of the avenues 
for industrial success open which invite 
the northern woman who would care for 
herself. Such occupations imply a con- 
centrated population, with money to spend 
and a growing taste for expensive living. 
To a limited extent a portion of these 
girls are occupied in the old style " fancy 
work," which is sold in the cities. Some 
of them go to the towns and find occupa- 
tion in the ordinary wants of a village of 
a thousand to five thousand people, where 
every avenue of domestic labor and the 
rougher outdoor labor is occupied by 
colored women, the abler of whom are 
making their way into occupations that 
are monopolized by respectable white 
women through the North. 

At present, the one broad avenue out 
of this quiet country life is school-teach- 
ing. Here the young w,omen of the 
better class are rapidly coming into 
almost complete possession. The young 
men fit for this work are largely seeking 
other and more lucrative employments. 
The average boy of twelve, even in the 
cities, leaves school, at least to begin to 
play "little man," and keep the wolf 
from the door. The daughters of the 
humbler white families, with increasing 
exceptions, are unfit for this work, save 
in remote localities and ignorant districts. 



So these young women of the old planta- 
tion families, a generation of whom have 
come up since i860, are now, under the 
supervision, often merely nominal, of a 
limited number of "superintendents," 
teaching the new public schools ot the 
South. In places where the colored 
youth are not up to the work, they are 
in the negro scllpols, in Baltimore and 
Charleston largely in the ascendant. 

It would awaken the most indifferent 
to a lively sympathy, to see how thousands 
of these young women are toiling for the 
moderate education that will fit them for 
this woik, as well as to obtain the or- 
dinary culture of a woman in good so- 
ciety. The most enterprising girl 
of a numerous household will, in some 
way, get together the one or two hundred 
dollars for which a year's schooling can 
be had in one of the academies that 
dot the country at intervals all over the 
South, and were the only schools of the 
mothers. Many of them were overthrown, 
but have been largely re-established, 
mostly without endowments, often with 
good teachers, working on meagre wages, 
the authorities turning every way to 
handle the crowd of eager applicants who 
often, not able to face the moderate ex- 
pense, are willing to pledge their future 
for any assistance. In one of these 
schools this good girl, probably over- 
worked, often does a remarkable amount 
of solid study in a short time, leaving 
when the funds give out. Their wisest 
teachers speak of the constitutional sensi- 
tiveness of great numbers of these young 
women, the inheritance of a generation 
born in a revolutionary period, as a 
serious drawback to the intense and pro- 
longed effort they attempt to make. 
This girl goes home to take the neighbor- 
hood school, or finds a better place else- 
where, and uses her little earnings to pay 
her debt or pull up her sisters below, the 
whole family being harnessed to her, till 
the load is drawn, the harness breaks, or 
the brave daughter marries and is relieved 
by the next in turn. 

Under this pressure, in country and 
city, very early marriages, into which the 
element of support largely enters, are 
inevitable. However social philosophers 
may deplore what they are pleased to call 



^^, 



258 



THE WOMAN'S MOVEMENT IN THE SOUTH 



the American decline of marriage, and 
however hateful may be the social rot of 
easy divorce, we are inclined to think 
that the evil resulting from these very 
early marriages of immature, half-edu- 
cated girls — with the fearful break-down 
of health and happiness, including its 
reflex action on the masculine South — is 
a yet mqre serious Sj^cial portent than 
frequent divorce, which all thoughtful 
Christian people deplore. Be that as it 
may, when the Southern people are for 
the first time getting upon the ground a 
system of education for the masses, it is 
little short of a providential interposition 
that so large a proportion of the choice 
young women of sixteen states are thus 
brought into the profession of instruction. 
To realize this fact we must imagine the 
entire wealthy and cultivated class in a 
northern state suddenly reduced to almost 
absolute poverty and the foremost young 
women of these families driven for a 
livelihood to teach in country district, 
village, and city schools, with the ladies 
of rich, well-known families, employed 
in the seminaries of secondary instruc- 
tion. It brings the finest culture and 
the consecrated young womanhood of 
the South into direct contact with the 
masses of children, — a beautiful "ob- 
ject lesson " in the divine way of 
lifting up the lowly and binding " all sorts 
and conditions " together by an enduring 
social bond. 

Fifteen years ago, these schools were 
largely taught by elderly men and women 
who had lost their all, and were qualified 
only as the ordinary woman or man of a 
superior class may be for this difficult 
work. But now the younger women are 
coming in ; and by their prodigious efforts 
to attain academical education, their at- 
tendance in multitudes on the summer 
institutes now held in all the states, in 
exceptional cases by visitation to the 
North at vacation schools, they are rap- 
idly preparing themselves for this good 
work. A more attractive, inquisitive, 
"plucky " crowd of young women is not 
to be found in this or any country. They 
are doing more valuable work for the 
children, under greater hindrances, for 
smaller pay, than any class of women 
anywhere. 



Outside of this, there is coming up in 
all the prosperous southern cities a mod- 
erate interest in opening new industrial 
avenues for white women. In every 
one of them there is the nucleus of an 
association, and in most of them an ac- 
tive society of ladies for the encourage- 
ment of home work, which will possibly 
grow into a school for artisans. Few of 
these movements have reached an in- 
fluential stage of development, and the 
girls wishing to fit themselves as teachers 
in such ways must still rely to a large 
extent upon instruction from without. 

Just below this class is coming up, in 
some portions of the South, a crowd of 
the daughters of the poorer white people 
of the hill and coast country, to co- 
operate in this educational work. Some 
of the girls' seminaries that I have visited 
are largely filled with this class of stu- 
dents. With all sorts of drawbacks, 
often with lack of health and home cul- 
ture in manners, and with no previous 
habits of application, they yet show no 
fatal lack of ability. Indeed, many of 
the finest pupils in all these schools are 
from such homes. One young woman, 
to whom it was my office to present a 
prize for superior scholarship in English 
literature, at the end of two years' 
schooling had written a critical essay on 
one of Shakespere's plays which brought 
another testimonial, from the Shake- 
spere Society of London. Yet this fine 
student was preparing to go back to her 
mountain home, to teach on the poor 
wages of the village school, to repay her 
brother the loan for her own education, 
his only opportunity for a two years' 
outing. My life for a dozen years past 
has been lived among such experiences 
as this, and I have come to realize, al- 
most with a flaring up of fiery indigna- 
tion, the supreme folly and intolerable 
selfishness of the awful luxury and waste- 
ful expensiveness that confronts me on 
coming homeward to the great centres 
of social recreation, after three-fourths 
of every year passed amid such longing 
for the bread and water of life. The 
women of our country have it in their 
power to educate every good girl thus 
struggling for the knowledge which must 
be the outfit for self-supporting woman- 



THE WOMAN'S MOVEMENT IN THE SOUTH. 



25& 



hood, by giving the margin that, be- 
yond all reasonable claim for comfor- 
table and even elegant living, now goes 
over into the social abyss. 

The great want of the better sort of 
colored young woman for the elementary 
schooling and industrial training which 
will make her an effective teacher, a 
worker in the church, a leader in the 
society of her people, and a Christian 
wife and mother, is being supplied by a 
group of admirable schools, largely sup- 
ported by northern funds, though partly 
by tuition fees paid in money or in labor. 
Money judiciously given for student aid 
to these schools goes to a good place. 
A great work could be done in southern 
cities by establishing an annex to the 
public schools for the training of large 
numbers of colored girls in home indus- 
tries, skilled housekeeping and the many 
ways of getting a living now opening to 
them. In every community there are 
bright graduates from the schools, from 
worthy families, who, leaving their studies 
at twelve or fourteen, have nothing to do 
but hover about a crowded country home, 
swarm the town pavements, and fall away 
under such temptations as beset all who 
live in this style. If these girls could be 
offered a thorough training of a year in 
a good school of housekeeping, or the 
many trades and industries by which a 
young woman can live, the present fear- 
ful condition of southern household ser- 
vice would be reformed, these children 
saved from abject poverty, shiftlessness, 
and impurity, and a great many would 
all the time be marching out of the 
slough of despond toward the uplands 
of a wholesome social life. A plant of a 
few thousand dollars in any southern 
city would purchase and furnish a suita- 
ble house among these people, where a 
good white or colored woman could live, 
making it a model home, receive her 
classes, train her pupils in practical home- 
making and, as opportunity offered, in- 
troduce new departments, till it became 
a centre of the better life to the whole 
aspiring class in the town. If a north- 
ern woman with tact and common sense, 
she coukl interest the best of the Chris- 
tian workers of the town in her enter- 
prise, and there might be awakened a 



new understanding and sympathy between 
the good working women of both sec- 
tions. Thanks to a few noble women 
and the wise administration of the public 
school system of Washington, D. C, this 
feature of the education of these people 
is now being rapidly developed there — 
though still far from sufficient to meet 
the dire necessity. We must do a prodi- 
gious amount of such work during the next 
twenty years, or by and by we shall have 
a black slough at the bottom of American 
society whose malaria will taint every 
palace and make republican government 
a chronic conflict. It would be best that 
some of these industrial homes should 
not be under the control of churches or 
connected with private or public schools, 
but be independent centres of good liv- 
ing, attracting by their own merits. 
These homes should at once be estab- 
lished, on a large scale, in every consid- 
erable southern city. Each of these 
towns is now educating a large number 
of bright young colored girls, who are 
all the time exposed to the demoralizing 
influence, of the multitude of idle and 
vicious negroes, the pest of southern 
society. The time is at hand when only 
a thorough system of vagrant laws, with 
truant schools, possibly compulsory in- 
dustrial schooling, will save the cities and 
villages of all these states from the un- 
endurable nuisance of becoming a para- 
dise for all the drift of every color and 
condition in the South. 

Anybody can run out these lines of 
thought, and conjecture the result of this 
sympathetic movement of the Christian 
women of the country toward the thou- 
sands of young white women in the South, 
who need aU that can be offered — all the 
more because they are not asking for 
themselves. And it does not require the 
imagination of a Zola to portray the re- 
sult of letting the daughters of these 
millions of emancipated slaves come up 
ignorant, vulgar, lazy, the great Amer- 
ican sewer under the back windows of 
every respectable home. 

All that any wise and loving woman 
hopes for her sex in the new republic is 
hoped and prayed for by thousands of 
young women in the South. For good 
or evil, the woman of the South has 



260 



THE WOMAN'S MOVEMENT IN THE SOUTH. 



made an irretrievable forward movement 
in the past thirty years. She must be the 
most influential factor in the upper realm 
of the new southern life. The home, the 
school, the church, the lighter industries, 
literature, art, and society will be her 
preserve. What she makes the new 
South, our children will find it, a genera- 
tion hence. Shall they find it another 
hostile land, threatening new revolutions, 
or shall it be to them a land of welcome 
and of patriotic union with all that is best 
and most precious at home ? 

But why, somebody may ask, talk to us 
of these things? Cannot the women of 
Texas and Louisiana and Alabama take 
care of themselves, bring up their own 
families, educate their sons and daughters, 
live in their own way without our help ? 
Have we not enough to do here in New 
England, New York, in the West, and 
beyond thfe mountains, to keep the north- 
ern end of the Union from going to the 
bad, that we must be burdened with this 
record' of the trials, temptations, .and 
needs of our sisters in the South ? I have, 
more than once met just this word, as I 
have urged these claims of the South 
upon us. It has the twang of the query 
of the oldest bad boy of Mother Eve : 
"Am I my brother's keeper"? After 
that, we seem to hear, chanting down 
through the centuries, the other song : 
" Whosoever giveth a cup of cold water 
to one of these little ones, in my name, 
shall in nowise lose his reward." 

But we write to the young women of 
our country, born in this glorious morning 
hour of the new republic, who must press 
onward if that republic is to be saved for 
the noblest civilization possible to this 
new age. To these young women of the 
North, we say : These young women of 
the South, your sisters and mine, are now 
doing so much to help themselves, are 
working and reaching upward so bravely 
after the best, that it should bring a blush 
of shame to the brow of any woman o-r 
man to speak those careless or cruel 
words that so easily fall from thoughtless 
or heated lips. Leave to the machine 
politician, to the narrow sectarian church- 
man, to whoever has neither interest nor 
ambition above the miserable petting of 
self, the poor amusement of bluffing sweet 



charity and heavenly justice with argu- 
ments like these. Leave- to the soulless 
satellite of fashion, to the stolid herd 
mired in gross comfort and smothered in 
stupid content in handsome environment, 
the conviction that the chief end of the 
woman of the upper class in America is 
to build a little social paradise, fence it in 
with a high hedge, and put a snapping 
terrier at the gate — leave it to such to 
go their way with this poor apology for 
not hearing a divine call. But let the" 
young sisterhood that lives for what is the 
highest and wisest and hohest, 'make 
haste over the borderland, bearing gifts 
of love and hope and good cheer to the 
thousands who are only awaiting their 
coming to run forward with welcome in 
their outspread hands, and thanksgiving 
in their overflowing hearts that, after a 
forty years' wandering of the fathers and 
mothers through a wilderness of blind 
contention closed by desolating war, we, 
their sons and daughters, find ourselves, 
at last, on the other side of Jordan, to 
abide together in the promised land. 
Believe nobody who declares that the 
young women of the South are haters of 
their country ; enemies of the North, 
proud and disdainful of the sympathy of 
good American people anywhere. There 
is nothing between the young women of 
the North and South save their ignorance 
of each other, and the difficulty of getting 
hold of each others' hands. If a thou- 
sand of the better sort of girls from Vir- 
ginia, Mississippi, and Texas could live 
for three summer months with a thousand 
of a similar class from Massachusetts, 
Ohio, and California, there would be a 
thousand new friendships and a rush of 
letters. North and South, which would 
wake up the drowsiest postmaster at the 
cross-roads, and bring two thousand fine 
fellows to the " anxious seat," with in- 
quiring minds concerning their sister's 
new dearest friends. There is no duty 
or privilege more imperative or inviting 
for the well-to-do young women of our 
northern states, than to put themselves in 
communication with their sisters in the 
South, by all the beautiful, beneficent 
devices so easy to any young woman 
really bent on having her own splendid 
will ni tier own womanly way. 



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CoMcnration Resources 
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




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